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Has improve beaten move?
The housing market is grinding to a halt, with sales near all-time lows. Rises in stamp duty are to blame, says Graham Norwood
Figures show once-mobile British householders now move home on average just once every 16 years, despite low interest rates and a decade of soaring house prices — similar to levels during the depths of the recession of the early 1990s and half as often as they did during the housing boom of the late 1980s.
The reason for the slowdown? The cost of moving has soared thanks to high levels of stamp duty introduced by Brown, and we are instead building extensions and undertaking dramatic refurbishments as promoted by Beeny and her fellow makeover experts.
Nicola and Tim Oddy, and their three children aged 4 to 14, who live in a hamlet near Port Isaac, Cornwall, are a typical family who wanted a bigger house but could not find one for sale. Instead, they found it cheaper and easier to extend their existing home.
“Availability was the big issue. We felt we would have to wait years because so few were on the market,” says Nicola, a businesswoman. “Then we compared the cost of moving with turning our house into a dream home and plumped for an extension.”